The news was late in picking up the toilet paper shortage. I sat down at two different toilets in the same day, registering the usual dismay, before I had the courage to bring it up in conversation. I guess the disruption of such a banal industry doesn’t become newsworthy until everyone is sitting there with a dirty ass, wondering where they are going to find something that will flush, hoping that they can get to it without pulling their pants up. Sure enough, when I finally got to grocery store, there was a blank spot on shelves. Paper towels, napkins, tissues, all in order, but not one damn package of toilet paper. So now everyone is doing what they once hid occasionally; making due with other, anally inferior paper products. Restaurants duct tape boxes of facial tissue above the empty dispensers.  Toilets clog. Asses itch. I’ve been timing my poops to coincide with showers. Somehow, toilet paper has always bothered me; in the store, buying only a giant package of double-ply rolls, and maybe a candy bar to offset my obvious lack of preparation. I’m not ashamed that I poop. I am humiliated that Walgreen’s has the tool that I need to poop. I am well aware of my dependence on industrial society in every other way. But I should be able to shit without buying something.
NPR is telling me about archeology. They are excavating in England. They find the usual artifacts dating back to Neolithic times. The English find their own history in the ground beneath them. In America, we find only ancient Indian burial grounds, angry spirits, a feeling that we don’t belong. I just started painting sets for small local theaters. It is still early enough in the job that I enjoy it. I love watching my brush gliding along the surface, changing its color in singular irreversible strokes. I always feel like I am doing a great job, until I step back to look at my progress. It is always patchy, uneven- there are stray splotches and drips that I didn’t notice. But this is a good job by all accounts. I am living close to the production of art, I am artsy. The conversation is mostly good, we listen to NPR. The thing is, I feel like everyone in this theater is living close to the production of art, but the actual thing happens somewhere else, behind closed doors, executive decisions in board rooms. Everyone is finishing it, no one is starting it. My last job was a telephone operator for a Sprint call center. It was tucked away in a tin warehouse just outside of town, down a street whose ominous entrance was formed by a strip club called XTC, and a swinger’s joint formerly known as Anchovies. Inside the call center, massive wiring switch boards were all clearly displayed, highways of colored wire neatly but superficially attached to the walls and ceilings. I worked a night shift, and it seemed to me that we were a cult, meeting in this nowhere place to enact the most complicated ritual in history. Between calls I could look around and hear the other operators chanting mantras into headsets, the same phrases repeated over and over, speaking into the impossibly dense shrine of the switch board looming at the far end of the room. The excitement of this vision wore off quickly and I quit. I can’t imagine the paint will hold me much longer. I heard the call center moved. On NPR, they are talking about an extended Israeli bombing campaign, 15 days around the clock and counting. Is the man at the bombing desk like me? Does he count the bombings before breaktime? Does he worry that it looks like he is slacking off, or thinking about sex? I take a bathroom break. Even the tissues are gone this time, so I reach for a playbill. It is glossy and stiff and utterly unideal.
            Back on set, I tell one of the set carpenters, “I just wiped my ass with the zoo story playbill.” He chuckles knowingly.
“Did it flush?”
“Barely.” I have a crush on his wife. She is a dancer and exercise instructor, and talks about her body a lot. At a party, she told me that the heat was making sweat run down her legs. My underwear is soaked, she said. I think I like her because I can’t have her. But I also have a fantasy that the two of them will raise my child. I spend a fair amount of time around couples now. I am the single guy. They suggest other friends they could hook me up with, but I am still relishing my damaged status. The truth is, if I go out by myself, women strike up conversations with me. I am attractive and the right amount of brooding. I can be a total wuss and still get chicks. But being a sad sack is my project right now, cultivating loneliness. I believe this will reconnect me to the world of emotions that I lose in relationships which last too long- which is every relationship. The grocery store is an ideal incubator for my bittersweet emotional garden. The bright fluorescents, hip young couples in pajamas, buying health food to advertise their well-adjusted love for one another. My hand-basket of freezer-pizzas and me. I try to work up some tears, but of course there is nothing. The only time I’ve cried in six years was at the Mars Rover Imax experience. The thundering rockets, the sequenced detaching of spent fuel tanks, the joy of aging nerds in the control room- awkward hugs and neglected families. The emotional lives of Mars rovers, the mythologized pictures of dirt. I poured tears in the complete darkness of the IMAX Theater. It was the closest I’ve ever felt to religious. I am counted in the non-Mormon minority here in Salt Lake. I have to admit, though, that this is God’s country. On an overcast day, I can clearly feel his presence. He is God in a grey sweatsuit, a salty God whose impeccable hygiene and twice-daily showering were not enough to remove the residue of a middle-age of a million marathons. Sadly, as ruler of the universe, he is subject to every occupational hazard. His blood runs with heavy metals, but not just residues; every ounce of mercury in these hills courses through his all-encompassing veins. His long white beard is becoming less Sistine chapel and more retired mall Santa. But this God invested well, and is now managing his assets from home, sleeping a little past 9. Salt Lake is beautiful from an airplane. From the sky you can see the flats, beautifully patinaed by minerals, and then eventually the pit mines carved into the mountains, glorious stadiums for giants; the stage showcasing the act of digging more seating.
At the rodeo with my carpenter buddy and his wife, the audience holds its breath as the rider hits the ground; a moment passes as hooves pound around him, while he tries to figure out which direction to run. He makes the undignified but necessary scramble for the wall, and cheering erupts. He is celebrated for eight seconds of masculinity, a time scale adjusted for premature ejaculation. Here is another place I can almost, but not quite, cry, the swelling excitement of the crowd swells tears behind my eyes. The sky is constellated with flying insects in the stadium lights. I need to go to the bathroom.
“I’ve gotta piss.” I say to my buddy. He tips his hat to me, making fun of the fact that I need to tell him this, the desire for praise leftover from childhood. In the bathroom, the urinal is trough-style. I try to pee along with the other bucks; I’m often piss-shy. I stare at an imperfection in the cinder block wall, really focusing on it, memorizing the shape and form. If the details are engrossing enough, the pee usually begins to flow. Not this time though. I zip up in defeat and head for a stall. There are rolls of brawny paper towels in a basket screwed above the ordinary dispenser.
Back outside the rodeo clown is free to fem it up, dancing like a cheerleader, Michael Jackson, Pee Wee Herman. The girls in the audience are attractive exclusively because of youth; their faces are built for middle age. After a fair silence standing together, my buddy’s wife tells me,
“They’re finding estrogen in the groundwater. Because the septic tanks are all clogging. Estrogen, fabric brighteners, and caffeine.”
I think for a while, clamoring for my cleverness to kick in. “I guess the Earth really is a woman.” She wrinkles her nose at me for this ill-designed comment. Shit, it gets worse as I mull it over. A woman as land is offensive on a deep level. Detergent brightener is a cheap stab at women doing laundry. Caffeine is more ambiguous, but uppity. I shift my attention back to the rodeo, and realize that the clown is the star. All the manly bull riders are disposable and distant, like the bulls. Most of the time the clown is holding the show alone. Last weekend the carpenter and I went fishing, and he caught the biggest bass of his life. I scrambled for the camera while the bass was alive. Then he killed it to keep it still on the measuring stick and scale. His joy faded somewhat at three and a half pounds. He shook the scale a bit to make sure it was working. The fish was beautiful and delicious. My buddy is a sunny guy. But you can clearly see the residue of arguments and pettiness between him and his wife, despite how good they are for each other. It’s funny; all of the men who hide their darkness from each other but show it to their wives.

I’m over at my buddy’s house, actually beneath it, in the strange desert that lives beneath all of these pier and beam houses. I make the sun rise and set over tiny sand dunes by raising and lowering my flashlight. We are replacing some plumbing that is hopelessly clogged.
“Do you think you could point that over here?” His says in reference to my wandering flashlight.
“Right. Of course.” I relish my role as a permanent child, but it is embarrassing, and sometimes even dangerous. We are working in silence, crouched in the dust, as my friend yanks and saws the big white pvc pipe connecting his toilet to the sewer.
“Ah Christ, it stinks right away,” I say as the saw pierces the pipe. When the pipe is completely free we rush/crawl to get out from under the house, laughing with displeasure. He throws the pipe in the garbage and we sit down at the picnic table to drink a beer. After a little while, looking down at his feet, he says, “The thought of you sleeping with my wife makes it hard for me to breathe.”
I am silent.
“It feels like my lungs will catch fire if I inhale.”
            “Well then, I won’t sleep with her.”
“I’m just saying.”
            “Of course, man. I mean, we wouldn’t ever…” Of course he knows what I think about. The obviousness makes me feel so stupid, like a little boy telling an absurd lie to an adult, and thinking he will get away with it.
            “There’s something disappointing about knowing where your poop goes, you know?” This change of subject confirms that we are still going to be friends. “It just goes through these PVC pipes, plain and simple. The mystery is gone.”
            “Yeah.” I agree. “That is kind of sad.”